Fiona Charles teaches organizations to manage their software testing risk, and IT practitioners project skills “beyond process” - hands-on practical skills essential to thrive and excel on any kind of software project. An expert test consultant and manager, she has been in the thick of the action through 30+ years of challenging projects across the business spectrum on both sides of the Atlantic. Throughout her career, Fiona has advocated, designed, implemented and taught pragmatic and humane practices to deliver software worth having. Fiona’s articles and blog posts appear frequently, and she conducts experiential workshops at international conferences, and in-house for clients. Contact Fiona via her website www.quality-intelligence.com, and follow @FionaCCharles on twitter.

Fiona’s sessions are a pre-conference training Test Leadership and a conference keynote Multiplying the Odds.

Gitte Klitgaard is an agile coach, hugger, friend, and much more. She lives and love agile. She took the oath of non-allegiance. Why fight over methods when we can use the energy to help people?

Her preferred tools are listening, intuition, and caring.

Gitte wants to change the world by helping people make the right product, doing it right and very important: have fun doing it.

Gitte is an active part of the agile community and is in the organiser team of both the German Agile Coach Camp and Play4Agile. She believes that the one essential thing of agile is “Inspect and Adapt”. You can say that her heart is in retrospectives.

She has a great interest in how people function, how the brain works, what motivates us, how we can feel better about our selves, how to be perfect in all our imperfections. She is a geek and passionate about a lot :)

Gitte’s sessions are a co-trained pre-conference training Effective Communication and a conference keynote.

Kevlin is an independent consultant and trainer based in the UK. His development interests are in patterns, programming, practice and process. He has been a columnist for various magazines and web sites. Kevlin is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know.

Kevlin’s sessions are a pre-conference training on Software Craftmanship and a conference keynote The Error of Our Ways.

Nicola delivers a conference keynote Taking Inspiration from Unlikely Sources.

Abby Bangser is a Quality Analyst and has worked on projects in the US, Kenya, India, and the UK. In addition to a diversity of countries, Abby has also had the opportunity to work in a variety of domains and team structures while at Consultant with ThoughtWorks. While the technical challenges of each domain and tech stack have been interesting, she has realised that team practices and team ownership have a much deeper impact on the end deliverable. In addition to client engagements, Abby is heavily involved in the internal QA community, new hire mentoring program, and local communities meetups in London. Outside of work, Abby is an avid athlete and adventurer through rock climbing, SCUBA diving, lacrosse, and now adding tag rugby to the list while in London!

I try to be a continuous learner and a continuous teacher, because I think good software comes from the skills of the people that are involved in the process, on each and every level. Whenever I write code I focus on reducing domain complexity to obtain maintainable software. I love to develop software that helps companies to improve their business, to implement solutions that improve their internal processes and to motivate teams to use their capabilities to yet another level.

Aki does not believe in magic. He makes it happen. Aki is a hiking guide of Suomen Latu and is using the leadership principles learned in such an agile environment in his daily work at Ambientia.

Professionally, he travel all around Europe to speak, to share and to listen with software craftspeople on what the community has learned. Aki is well known in Software Craftsmanship Communities all over Europe for his down-to-earth and human touch. In short - Aki is a fluffy programmer.

Meet a man who is living his dream.

Alastair is a developer at Cloud Hub 360. While he enjoys writing C# on the back end and HTML/CSS/JavaScript on the front end, he’s tried a number of languages over the last decade and found his real interests lie in good coding practices and ensuring software quality with automated tests. He is the founder of the Cambridge Software Craftsmanship Community in the UK and a co-organiser of DDD East Anglia. He can be found on Twitter @alastairs.

Alex Schladebeck is the head of Test Consulting at BREDEX GmbH and is also Product Owner for Jubula, the open source test tool. Within both roles, she’s responsible for making sure that customers’ needs are satisfied, be it in terms of quality assurance services for their projects or features for implementation. You’ll usually find Alex talking about quality and how it affects the whole development process. She’s also a frequent speaker at conferences where she likes to share her project experiences and learn from other practitioners.

Angie Jones is a Consulting Automation Engineer at LexisNexis who advises several scrum teams on QA Automation strategies and best practices, and has developed automation frameworks for countless software products. As a Master Inventor, she is known for her innovative and out-of-the-box thinking style which has resulted in more than 20 patented inventions in the US and China. Angie is also an adjunct college professor who teaches Java programming, and volunteers regularly to teach coding workshops in an effort to usher more women and minorities into technology. Angie has been featured in Ebony magazine as one of the country’s 30 young leaders under the age of 30; Women of Color magazine as a “Technology Rising Star”; Triangle Times as a “mover and shaker”, and Spectacular magazine as the “Future of Tech in the Triangle”.

Angie’s delivers a pre-conference training on Starting out with Selenium and a conference workshop session on How to Get Automation Included In Your Definition of Done.

Bhagya Perera is a software testing enthusiast who is originally from Sri Lanka and currently lives and works in England for Reed Business Information (RBI), a part of Reed Elsevier. She has a lot of experience working as an offshore team member and knows how much the experience can differ when it comes to on-site teams. Bhagya also co-hosts the RBI Global QA-chapter to help herself and other testers share experiences. In addition, she has strong interests in leadership, effective communication and mentoring that broadens her knowledge. Also, be advised… whenever you want her to listen to you, be sure to use the imperial march music. It always works! You can reach her at @bhagyagdm.

Chris had written code for many years, but was close to give up software after the hobby became a full-time profession - and with that, frustrating. Quality in the software industry felt too low, and people didn’t hug a lot. Gardening seemed nice enough. Luckily, they met the software craftsmanship community and made friends that share the passion and want to raise the bar. Today, Chris spends most time travelling to / organising unconferences such as SoCraTes and between that works as a contractor, trying to help clients improve their software development process and practices to a point where it can be both fun and profitable.

Damian Synadinos started testing software - on purpose and for money - in 1993. Since then, he has helped “build better software and build software better” using various methods and tools in numerous roles at many companies in diverse industries. Over the past ten years, Damian has focused primarily on teaching and leading testers and improving processes. Currently, he runs his own consulting company, Ineffable Solutions, specializing in IT and focusing on testing . In addition to testing, Damian enjoys performing improv comedy, golfing, playing poker and basketball, gaming, acting, cartooning, and spending time with his family.

Daniel Billing enjoys testing in all it’s variety. Recently he has been focusing hard on security and it’s implications for testing and testers. He’ll be running a training on how testers can incorporate security testing techniques and knowledge into their day to day work. But you can talk to him about anything you like! I particularly like Science Fiction, soccer, good food, beer and exercise!

Dan also a facilitator for Weekend Testing Europe, an organiser of SWEWT, and South West Test in Bristol.

Dan teaches a half-day pre-conference training Web Application Security: A Hands on Testing Challenge and is available to share on Security Testing throughout the conference lean coffees and open spaces.

Dragan Spiridonov is a test lead with a background as a teacher. He currently works at Drytools, a Serbian start-up. With 18 years of IT experience and recent move to the testing, his testing work puts together things he is learning now with things he’s learned in other roles over the years. He’s been a system and network administrator, customer support, developer, trainer and a teacher, and now a tester. His interest in learning and sharing shows in the nickname his friends use on him, as they call him the professor. Dragan contributes in the local community (Test’RS Club) and shares actively at work. He is a father of two princesses, and teaching kids is part of his interests as he delivers “How to code with or without computer” workshops for kids.

Emily Bache is a consultant with nearly 20 years of experience working as a software developer and test automation architect in organizations as diverse as multinational corporation to small startup. Over the years she has learnt that to be truly agile, teams need to learn use agile engineering practices, and this is her focus. Emily is the author of “The Coding Dojo Handbook: a practical guide to creating a space where good programmers can become great programmers” and loves to coach and teach about Test Driven Development, designing Test Cases, Refactoring, and more. Emily speaks regularly at international events such as Agile Testing Days, XP2013, ACCU, Europython and EuroSTAR.

Felienne is assistant professor at Delft University of Technology, where she researches programming for everyone. Her research has focused on the application of software engineering methods to spreadsheets and to programming for children in Scratch.

One of Felienne’s biggest passions in life is to share enthusiasm for programming with others. She teaches a group of kids Lego Mindstorms programming every Saturday, serves on the board of Devnology, a Dutch developer community that organizes monthly meetings on all things software, and is one of the founders of the Joy of Coding conference, a one day developer conference in Rotterdam celebrating the joy and art of programming. If she is not coding, blogging and teaching, she is probably dancing Lindy Hop, out running, watching a movie or playing a (board)game.

Huib Schoots is a tester, consultant and people lover. He shares his passion for testing through coaching, training, and giving presentations on a variety of test subjects. With almost twenty years of experience in IT and software testing, Huib is experienced in different testing roles. Curious and passionate, he is an agile, exploratory and context-driven tester who attempts to read everything ever published on software testing. A member of TestNet, AST and ISST, black-belt in the Miagi-Do School of software testing and co-author of a book about the future of software testing. Huib maintains a blog on magnifiant.com and tweets as @huibschoots. He works for Improve Quality Services, a provider of consultancy and training in the field of testing. Huib has a huge passion for music and plays trombone in a brass band.

Joel Hynoski had a lucky break when he was asked to become the Test Manager for a telecommunications company where he was working as a software engineer. It was there that his eyes were opened to the creativity of testing and the incredible increase in developer productivity that could be realized by a strong testing culture and solving problems using engineering rather than brute force hard work. Joel has been working in infrastructure tools and engineering for the past 18 years and manages the Automation, Observability, Release Engineering and Test teams at Lyft. Previously, Joel has experienced and influenced the engineering productivity cultures at companies from startup stage to larger corporations – from Google, Apple (iOS) and Twitter to Pure Networks and Open Telecommunications.

“Name: Joep Schuurkes”
“Habitat: Rotterdam”
“Occupation: scrum master”
“Favourite programming language: Perl, but starting to lean towards Python”
“Name of first pet: Timmy”
“What I answer when asked that online: gy.eRJtxxN2-#$n@!:=u{7*,”“
“Quirk: refusing to write scrum master with capital letters”
“Things I’d do if I had the time: play go, become a better cook, g̶r̶o̶w̶ ̶a̶ ̶b̶e̶a̶r̶d̶”“
“Favourite quote: You get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it. - David Foster Wallace”
“Online presence: @j19sch, testingcurve.wordpress.com”
“Bonus word: fountain pen”

Jokin is a professional Tester since 2008, he has gone from Visual Basic 5.0 to Ruby on Rails, from Waterfall to Scrum and then to Kanban, and then to something else that is a mixture.

In his current role, he has chosen to be the fellow tester at www.flywire.com making (many) questions, testing things, validating assumptions and automating checks, these which deserve to be automated.

Student of software testing and everything related, he traveled afar to workshops with James Bach, Michael Bolton, Huib Schoots and many others… and one night he invited Pradeep Soundararajan to dinner, so he knows about the secret sauce of testing.

He writes about testing on his blog: http://jokinaspiazu.blogspot.com.es/ and gives talks at conferences when he get invited and/or selected to do so.

He lives in Valencia (Spain) , where he is happily married, and father of three.

Juha Kivekäs is a security consultant by day and a DevSecOps enthusiast by the afternoon. His work on automated security tools is driven by enthusiasm and a believing in a more secure future powered by agile methods and robots. With a background from Helsinki University he now works for F-Secure.

Liz Keogh is an independent Lean and Agile consultant based in London. She is a well-known blogger and international speaker and a core member of the BDD community. She likes to spot patterns in unusual places, and has a love of language, people and their potential, and creating choices. She is currently interested in modelling risk and change with complexity thinking and the Cynefin framework.

Maaret Pyhäjärvi is a software professional with testing emphasis. She identifies as an empirical technologist, a tester and a programmer, a catalyst for improvement and a speaker. Her day job is working with a software product development team as a hands-on testing specialist. On the side, she teaches exploratory testing and makes a point of adding new, relevant feedback for test-automation heavy projects through skilled exploratory testing. In addition to being a tester and a teacher, she is a serial volunteer for different non-profits driving forward the state of software development. She blogs regularly at http://visible-quality.blogspot.fi and is the author of Mob Programming Guidebook.

Maaret’s session is a pre-conference training on Mob Testing where you learn a new way of learning about testing. The tasks worked on in the session are on both exploratory testing and test automation.

Matt Lavoie loves solving real problems for real people, and inspiring others to do the same. Though his career began in software development, it pivoted to user experience design after he discovered the field and saw a need for the role. He is now a Sr. User Experience Designer at PowerDMS, a cloud based crucial content platform, and founder of the Downtown UX Meetup, a community of UX professionals and advocates in Orlando, Florida.

Matt teaches a half-day pre-conference training Uncover the Usability Gaps in Your Product and a demo talk in the conference titled Testing for Usability.

Nicolai Parlog

Nicolai’s session is a talk JUnit 5: Next Generation Testing on the JVM is introducing the timely release of JUnit 5 - scheduled just around the conference time.

As a C64 and Amiga veteran, Ron heard the calling of the Internet and got into programming websites in early 2000. Ever since graduating from University he’s worked in various technical IT positions. Thoroughly enjoying testing, Ron fully concentrated on software quality in 2008. He successfully built up browser and app automation suites as well as test teams in Germany and the UK while working for a leading international web and mobile software provider for the construction industry. Ron has vast experience in crowdtesting and now specializes in mobile testing. He’s currently Mobile Team Lead for QualityMinds, a Software Quality Consultancy in Munich and has been engaged in mobile and web projects. As life’s not all about work, he likes mountain biking and climbing as well as spending time with his wife and three sons.

Rosie Sherry is founder of Ministry of Testing. She likes to do awesome things to make the testing world better. She lives in Brighton (UK). You can find her personal blog at http://rosiesherry.com

Ru Cindrea (@ru_altom) is a senior test consultant and managing partner at Altom Consulting (altom.fi). With more than ten years of experience in software testing, she is particularly interested in mobile testing and test automation with a special interest in mobile games. Ru is an instructor for the Black Box Software Testing series offered by Altom in collaboration with KFA. She is an organizer of the Test Lab, an open-space concept organized at testing conferences where participants practice testing and learn from their peers.

Sami is one of Finland’s leading experts in context-driven quality practices. He has over twelve years of history from a variety of testing and quality leadership positions in nearly twenty different business domains. He’s a colorful blogger, award winning author of industry publications and a co-founder of Software Testing Finland, a local context-driven testing community. He regularly shares experiences from his domain of expertise in domestic and international events. Currently he works as a head of testing at TeliaSonera and as a consultant via his company Happy Monkey.

The same white-hot passion Sami feels towards his wife Malin and baby girl Vilja. Whatever time is left from work and family life he spends stumbling in jujutsu, throwing a round of disc golf, enjoying a nice glass of whisky and being afraid of what might attract his passion next. :)

My name is Vivien and I currently work for House of Test. Some folks call me by my native name: Ronke but I also like to describe myself as a terrific tester! I have coined this from my terrific love for testing and the aggressiveness with which I approach my test task. However I take the definition of terrific that is defined as “awesome” in description of my personality as a tester and that part of being terrifying (fear and awe) towards bugs and anything that degrades the quality of the product. I have a background in Electrical Electronics Engineering. My experience as a tester has been in the mobile industry and Medical technology. I have also studied MBA and MSc. in Electrical Engineering. The blend of MBA with testing profession empowers me with the possibility to leverage my testing skills with some level of business mindedness. I’m quite excited and passionate about testing and for me, testing has been more than a profession, it has been a way of life!